Farms Struggle To Dispose Of Plastic

11/30/09 6:34AM
Amy Quinton

(Host) We tend to
think of farm fields as bucolic, natural landscapes. But farms increasingly
rely on plastic to store hay and silage, to build temporary greenhouses and to
pot plants.

As part of a
collaboration with Northeast public radio stations, Amy Quinton from New Hampshire
Public Radio reports that farms and nurseries are using so much plastic --
thousands of pounds a year --that they're having a tough time getting rid of
it.

(Quinton) Dairy farmer
Tim Toule has about 80 cows on his farm in Loudon,
New Hampshire, just north of Concord.

Feeding them requires
150 acres of hay and corn, and a convenient way to store all of it.

For Toule - like many
other farmers - that means plastic.

(Toule) "These are double wrapped ones. There's two
layers of this on them."

(Quinton) Toule tears
off plastic from a 56 pound roll that he uses to cover his round hay bales.

Next to his bales is a
huge machine that spits out silage into what are called ag bags.

(Toule) "See the idea of this here is to keep the air
out of your product. Once air enters it you get molding and spoilage and then
it's no good."

(Quinton) Farmers used
to store hay in silos or barns.

Now it's encased in
plastics to protect it from moist weather in the Northeast.

The ag bags are about
eight feet in diameter and 200-feet long.

They look like giant
white earthworms lying in Toule's fields.

It adds up to a lot of
plastic every year.

(Toule) "Typically I probably use about a thousand
pounds a year, between my bales and my bags."

(Quinton) Because some
of that plastic can be dirty or torn, it's hard for Toule to reuse it, or to
find a recycler who will take dirty plastic.

He says he has only
one way to get rid of the bags.

(Toule) "We take them to the town dump."

(Quinton) Farmers all
over the region are facing the same problem.

So are nurseries and
garden centers, which are saddled with plastic greenhouse covers, trays and
pots.

Not far from Toule's
farm, Doug Cole operates a garden center and a nine acre nursery.

He estimates his
company goes through about a half million plastic flower pots a year - made
from polypropylene, one of the less common plastics.

(Cole) "It's tough to get someone to want to use it
and recycle it. As far as I know all the people that are interested in
recycling it are in the Midwest."

(Quinton) Cole says
he's found just one company out of Michigan that's willing to pick up and recycle his flower
pots.

But only when he has a
full truckload.

Cole says most garden
centers -even the large ones - end up taking their pots to landfills.

Landfills can be a
long distance in some states, costing farmers up to a thousand dollars to truck
plastics.

And that's if the
plastics are accepted.

Cole says some
landfill operators won't even take the larger pieces of plastic like greenhouse
covers and ag bags.

(Cole) "They don't want to deal with this big bundle
that we create. No matter how much we fold it up, it's still not neat so they
need to get rid of that bulk."

(Quinton) In order to
recycle the material most processors want it neatly baled, which requires
expensive machinery.

Lois Levitan is director
of the Recycling Ag Plastics Project at Cornell University.

She says the problem
leaves farmers with little choice for the plastics.

(Levitan) "In many states whether it's legal or not,
they're either burning them in an open field, or they're plowing them into the
ground, or just sticking them in the woods."

(Quinton) While it's
illegal in most Northeastern states to burn in open fields, only recently was
it banned in New
York.

Levitan says farmers
were burning the plastic, which releases toxins in the air.

She's hoping to
prevent that, by working with states to set up recycling systems.

But the bigger
challenge is finding enough of a market to recycle the soiled plastic into new
products, like decking or road filling.

For VPR News, I'm Amy
Quinton.

(Host) Northeast
Environmental coverage is part of NPR's Local News Initiative. It is funded, in
part, by a grant from United Technologies.